Down the Up Staircase

"Who was the grreatest Italian painter?"

"Leonardo da Vinci."

"Wrong. Giotto. He is my favorite."

Such is the pedagogy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. A burring, feline spinster, Miss Brodie (Maggie Smith) lives off the baby fat of the land--Edinburgh, 1932. In a provincial girls' public school, she inscribes her prejudices on scores of blank pupils. Her taste becomes their only touchstone, her politics their only truth. "I am in the business," she loftily announces, "of putting old heads on young bodies."

Middle-aged heads would be more accurate. The autumnal Miss Brodie may believe she is in ascension; actually, she is heading down the up staircase, and every move brings her closer to destruction. Her charges are wise to her romances--with a married artist (Robert Stephens) and a bumbling music master (Gordon Jackson). Their giggles harden into gossip, and Miss Brodie is asked to resign. When she refuses, the administrators lie in wait for her next indiscretion. It is not long in coming.

Like many an autocratic schoolmarm, Miss Brodie is not in love with men, she is enamored of power. To her, Mussolini and his Fascisti offer humanity's best hope. She sends one girl packing to fight in Spain for the Falangists--where she is killed. Her favorite informant (Pamela Franklin) turns against her and squeals to the authorities. "Assassin!" shrieks Miss Brodie, and the echoing walls provide a bogus, melodramatic echo.

Muriel Spark's novella was first published in America in The New Yorker. Mrs. Jay Allen's adaptation (of her own stage version) betrays its source at every turn. Its details are unfailingly accurate. The school is a chalk dust bowl; the staff is a frightened gaggle arranged in perfect pecking order; the girls throw themselves into adolescence as if they were breaking the sound barrier. But, as in much New Yorker fiction, while the parts promise a vision, the whole does not even provide a view.

Amid rigged climaxes and sobbing violins, Smith acts Miss Brodie with tact and subtlety. But even profound craftsmanship cannot create sympathy. From the opening it is clear Miss Brodie is a petty self-deceiver and the fabric of her life is threadbare and shabby. The rest of the film is only variations on a seam. "A guid beginnin' makes a guid endin'," her class is informed. Aye; if only the revairrse did not hoold as well.

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